Personal Priorities

First, I know I should do some writing up of a few weekly status updates, those will follow soon - I still have a quite large backlog of TODO items from the last weeks. But here's something I want to get into the public first:

As you might know, my recent visit to the US was not just for pleasure, but also for having a number of talks with people at Mozilla in Mountain View, some of which were centered around the very core of SeaMonkey - and even about myself to some degree.

In those talks, around them, and in the followup, even during my vacation time, I came to think a lot about esp. my personal future. I knew before that I'm putting too much strain on myself currently, but having no free room for creative or visionary thinking and being constantly on edge, working mostly on "should have been done a long time ago" items instead of fun and future-oriented things even felt worse when I gained some distance to it - first with the different work environment and orientation I saw in the Mozilla offices, then with relaxing some when driving around and doing sightseeing and things like that, almost without any pressure of timeframes or things that have to be done "yesterday".

Now I surely can work in an environment where I have a list of things I need to do, but I need to get off the state where I feel that a lot of things will never happen if I don't take them on, and where I have to work overly long hours constantly just to stay on top of things. Apart from that, I need to "get a life", just for my own sanity. And finding time for finally finishing my studies and get that Master's degree would be a good thing as well.

I have been in the SeaMonkey project for a few years now, and it surely has been a fun ride, I learned that I can do and love release and project driving, that I can keep a good overview of what's going on in such a project as well as the overall Mozilla community (even though one can never know everything there), but we are at a point where both the SeaMonkey project and me need to go in new directions, and I'm not yet sure if those are aligned at all.

I'm coming more and more to think that this might be the point where I need to go a different path than this project. I'm not convinced of this view yet, but I know that my life has to change in a few ways - apart from going back to a more humane amount of work, I need to free myself from constantly fighting an uphill battle that very much of the time seems to be fought against people who actually should be friends. I want to be able to spend resources on making the web more open, to improve privacy and identity management for people on the Internet, to make social contacts a story of freedom instead of walled gardens - and I'm not sure if the road the SeaMonkey project is taking will allow me to do that, as up to this time, the routine of what I'm doing has not enabled me to do that and I don't see the playing field for our project getting significantly nicer. I'm trying to rebalance my personal priorities, and this project might not be the impersonation of those any more.

Still, I have a lot of heart in this project, I love the people working on it, who I see as very dedicated, efficient and passionate, and I surely am fond of browser/messaging integration as well as having advanced features at the top of your fingertips. Wherever I'm going, I will support SeaMonkey in the transition to the future that is upcoming for this project - and I really want to see it succeed - with or without me being actively there.

I haven't decided where I'm going or if I fully stay with SeaMonkey, and as I said, I will fully support the transition, so no need to panic or something like that. What I have decided is that I need to change my personal priorities to match the man I want to be better, and to leave some room for ideas, visions, and some "real life" (whatever that is).